Under a brilliant early-morning sky in Berkeley, California, Peter Duesberg pushes his bicycle along Oxford Street while animatedly explaining his new theory of cancer — oblivious to the fact that he is about to walk in front of a car. A professor of molecular and cell biology at the University of California at Berkeley, the 71-year-old Duesberg could pass for a younger man. He is slender, with white hair and strong features, and today he is wearing a black leather jacket over a button-down shirt. Cancer is an old passion, a topic he has been researching for more than 40 years. Now his radical theory on the origins of the disease is finally winning serious attention.
He is so absorbed in conversation that only as disaster is about to strike does he look up to see the car bearing down on him. Duesberg giggles as if enjoying a private joke and steps back to the curb, pulling his bike with him. But even before he reaches the safety of the sidewalk, he has resumed his explanation of aneuploidy, the basis of his theory about the cause of cancer.
Duesberg is no stranger to controversy — or oncoming traffic. On March 1, 1987, he published a paper in Cancer Research questioning the role of HIV in causing AIDS. The paper became the line in the sand, the demarcation between Duesberg the golden boy of biology — part of the team that first mapped the genetic structure of retroviruses, codiscoverer of the first viral cancer gene in 1970, clever critic — and Duesberg the demon.
For 23 years before the publication of that paper, Duesberg says, he never had an application for public funding of his research turned down. In 1986, at age 49, he was elected to the National Academy of Sciences. That same year he was given a National Institutes of Health Outstanding Investigator Award, one of the most prestigious and coveted grants. Robert Gallo, co-discoverer of HIV and a former friend of Duesberg’s, praised him in 1985 as a “man of extraordinary energy, unusual honesty, enormous sense of humor, and a rare critical sense.” He added, “This critical sense often makes us look twice, then a third time, at a conclusion many of us believed to be foregone.”
Since the 1987 article on HIV, Duesberg has become a pariah among scientists. More than 20 of his grant proposals for government funding have been turned down. AIDS activists have denounced him in public protests and media campaigns. Friends, Gallo among them, have abandoned him. His laboratory, once staffed by two secretaries and numerous graduate students and postdocs, is now occupied by only Duesberg himself and one graduate student — although undergraduates do circulate in and out. He has no secretary. His wife, who pinch-hits as an assistant, talks in a whisper about the pain of his exclusion from the rest of academia, social events, and a normal life.
